xintra: It's a reanimated meme. It's a mummeme. It's a zombat. It's a... LOLSANT! http://t.co/K8rFCEvd

by Carl Wilson

Memory, as everybody knows, is an odd, perverse thing. When I first saw the reunited Scud Mountain Boys’ stage setup at Lee’s Palace last weekend, I said, “Oh, that’s funny, it’s just like the photo on the back of one of their albums where they’re sitting in somebody’s apartment around a kitchen table, playing and drinking.” Then I came across the above 1990s-era photo online, clearly not a candid home snapshot but one that includes microphones and at least a bar booth if not an actual stage. Was this the album shot, or a publicity picture I got with the Sub Pop CD reissue of their first two albums, when I worked at an alt-weekly in Montreal in the mid-90s, which is how I first heard of the band? Or another picture altogether? I wanted to dig out my copy of the CD to check, but almost all my CDs are walled in with a bunch of boxes in a nook off my kitchen and retrieving it would be basically a home-renovation project.

What a more exhausting and error-fraught sort of excavation it must be to dig up three people with whom you were once intimate, but haven’t spoken to in 14 years, and propose that you do the thing you used to do together, before you stopped talking. But now-Toronto-based songwriter Joe Pernice (better known for his subsequent and current band, the Pernice Brothers) did that after a close mutual friend of the group’s unexpectedly died. The deceased had been a fan and the idea was to honour his memory. Not right after, though. As Pernice explained on stage, it took him a year to make the phone calls. But whatever he was afraid of happening didn’t happen, maybe because “nobody really remembers what caused all the shit any more.”

What I hadn’t known was that the kitchen-table-on-stage was a standard live Scuds motif in their initial run, around the Boston area, not a cute reunion gimmick. You could argue that now it has become a cute reunion gimmick. I think it is more apt to say that it is a technique, one of those stage-magic tricks you discover and maintain because it works, makes the show the way you need it to be. Now I find it virtually impossible to picture them standing in standard band configuration, rather than drinking beers off the table (Americans visiting Toronto always love Keiths), bending over in the uncomfortably expressive angles around their instruments that people do in a home song-swap session (not a “jam,” as Pernice admonished), mumbling in each other’s ears, telling tales between tunes.

But this was not folksy-homey coffeehouse shtick. Pernice’s songs are too infused with rue for that, as much as classical pop craftsmanship ever has been, lying (their pretty white asses off) where the mouths of the George Jones, Jimmy Webb, Alex Chilton and Joe Strummer rivers meet. His persona now is laid back and salty-charming, but the songs make it easy to picture it when his back-in-the-day yarns tend to include heavy doses of anti-anxiety meds. Then you’re tempted to imagine “all the shit” wasn’t so much the bass player, the mandolinist/drummer or the lead guitarist’s faults – but maybe that’s just because they weren’t talking as much on stage. Second-guessing other people’s memories is an even less reliable thing.

Indeed, I wondered what the person in question would have had to say about the story Pernice told about writing one of his best-loved songs: A girlfriend at the time, he said, kept going on about what a romantic song “Hey Jealousy” by the Gin Blossoms was, and he exasperatedly responded that the guy in the song was just trying to get laid. To prove his point he wrote a seductive, early-70s-style, gorgeously hazy tune in which a guy tries to wheedle his way back into a girl’s bed (“I would give anything to make it with you, one more time/ I would give everything I own”), which builds up to chillingly menacing insinuations. He titled it, “Grudge Fuck.”

The crowd was full of pushing-middle-aged folks, no doubt with their own recollections to husband. There wasn’t a lot of dancing or swaying, as if everybody were still following the cool-rules of 1997, when they went to more shows, when audiences stood or sat nodding with their arms crossed whenever not moshing. But when they did express emotion, it was with surprisingly rowdy outbursts, of varying appropriateness: Why did people scream every time Boston was mentioned? Was the room really full of Mass. expats or were they just trying to bonafide their in-the-knowdom? Even on a Saturday in a bar, do you shout every time a song mentions drinking and drugging, when those are the things clearly killing the protagonists? Jeez, it wasn’t St. Patrick’s Day.

Unfair. But the intimacy made it tempting to rubberneck into people’s minds. Pernice suddenly did a double take at a woman holding up a homemade shirt in the front row: “Is that you?” He explained that she’d shown him the same shirt at a show in another town 15 years ago – when her parents brought her, and she was, “like, 13. … Wait, I don’t like the way that sounds.” The dysfunctional-neighbourhood feel was cemented when Sadies (and former Pernice Bros) drummer Mike Belitsky cracked the singer up so much from the back of the room with a text message (his iPhone was on the table, to watch the time) that Pernice had to take a few minutes’ break after corpsing on his first couple of tries at the Scuds’ somberly beautiful cover of Cher’s “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves.” He had to think of “nuns beating me” and other dark childhood images to regain composure.

After all, I’m not the boss of anybody else’s nostalgia. (Though I’m tempted to call Pernice on leaving out that he didn’t just “work in a bakery” when the band started, but was doing an MFA in creative writing.**) Hell, I’m not even the boss of mine. I was grateful finally to see a band that never played near me in their original lifespan. And to see them enjoying each other’s company. Even though there’s a part of me that selfishly hopes this slight return will be the sum of it. That even wishes they’d remained, as the slogan of Lubbock, Texas’s The Flatlanders had it, “More a Legend than a Band.” (Yet even they later reunited for a string of shows and new records.) That sympathizes with Darren Hayman’s title, “We Love the Bands that Don’t Re-form.”

It’s an adult pleasure to have memories that stay memories, memories you can’t recover, even ones you never got to attain in the first place. Perhaps we just confuse reality with rarity, essence with inaccessibility. We think there’s only so much room around a kitchen table. Or, whether superstitiously or maybe with real folk wisdom, we long for minor rites of sacrifice, destruction, some kind of preview of death and loss to gird us for the real thing, even fantasizing it can homeopathically prevent the real thing: “I’m going to burn the silo when you go,” a farmer whose wife is on the way out sings in one sterling Scuds song. “You’ll see the flames, and maybe know.”

We’re damn fools, the thing is. Can’t we be allowed sometimes to forget that? The sugar-lick torture of the Scud Mountain Boys was to remind us and make us like it.

 

** Joe informs me that there was a significant time lag between the bakery and the grad-school period – sorry for presuming on my own in-the-knowness!

xintra: Branson, MO ransacked by tornado? Davy Jones in Davy Jones' Locker?! CASINO ENTERTAINMENT FANS: FORM HUMAN SHIELD AROUND TONY ORLANDO, STAT

Recently added to the Artbase: IHSE by Esther Hunziker

IHSE is a series of autonomous architectural buildings. Each photo shows a geometric figure, which overrides the forms of classical architecture. There is no roof nor a base, no top or bottom. The buildings float in the void. Architecture which looks like concrete capsules through which one can move into a different space-time continuum. The interactive online version of the photo series IHSE, responds to the mouse movements of the user. You hear a spherical, meditative sound in the background. Architectural buildings float slowly in empty space and endlessly multiply themselves out of themselves. They grow to a certain size until they divide into two. By moving the mouse the user can intervene in this process, slow down or accelerate the growth and turnaround the direction of the IHSE travel.

Events/Lectures/Exhibitions:

• The Use and Abuse of Technology in the Arts, Thu Mar 08, 2012 19:00 – Thu Mar 08, 2012, New York, New York 
• Resonate – Belgrade New Media Festival – March 2012, Fri Mar 16, 2012 10:00 – Sat Mar 17, 2012, Belgrade, Serbia
• Robots and Avatars, Fri Mar 16, 2012 12:00 – Sun May 27, 2012, Liverpool, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

Jobs:

• ARTIST: POST MFA FELLOW, The Ohio State University’s Department of Art
• ANIMATION FACULTY (GRANT-FUNDED), The Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA)
• EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, WESTERN NEW YORK BOOK ARTS CENTER, The Western New York Book Arts Center (WNYBAC)
• WEB APPLICATION DEVELOPER, ALLDAYEVERYDAY

Call for Submissions:

• Open Call for Curated Youtube Playlists, Sat Mar 10, 2012 11:00, Los Angeles, California
• CFP: ISMAR 2012 – The 11th IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality, Fri May 25, 2012 23:59, Atlanta, Georgia
• ESPACIO ENTER, art, science, innovation call, Wed May 30, 2012 06:05, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canary Island, Spain

Misc:

• Nicolás Colón inaugural show at GALLERIE 5, MINER PIE / MODERN PACKAGING, Thu Feb 23, 2012 02:10 – Wed Feb 29, 2012, Online 
• New in the Pharmakon Library: Claudia Hart : Food for Children, Wed Feb 22, 2012 23:40 – Wed Feb 29, 2012, San Francisco, California
• iSpy @ Flux Factory in April, Thu Mar 01, 2012 13:00, Queens, New York
• CFP: Digitize This: Exploring/Exploiting the Rise of Digital Arts & Digital Humanities, Sun Apr 01, 2012 23:55, Worcester, Massachusetts

More…

 

Personal project: head

noiseforairports:

Drones play the James Bond theme. This is amazing.

(via explore)

theremina:

Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, photographed by Judy Linn

[Image: From the talk by Zebra Imaging at Studio-X NYC; photos by BLDGBLOG].

Last week at Studio-X NYC, we hosted Michael Klug of Zebra Imaging, whose 3D printable holographs I also had the pleasure of covering for the 2012 Year in Ideas issue of Wired UK.

The gist of Zebra's work can be gleaned from that article, but a few things were mentioned at the event—including Klug's reference to his company as engaging in a new form of "light control"—that seemed worth recounting here.

[Image: From the talk by Zebra Imaging at Studio-X NYC; photos by BLDGBLOG].

In the second half of his talk, after presenting the difficult physiology of vision and the workings of the human eye, Klug described the cartographic applications of his firm's work. He showed several examples of streetscapes and building interiors that had been mapped via laser scanners and turned into—that is, printed as—3D holographs. Here, Klug used a military phrase—the Common Operating Picture (or Common Operational Picture)—as he showed us rendered slides of small combat teams attempting to understand an unfamiliar urban environment by way of detailed holographic prints. So this brings me to two points I want to mention:

1) At one point, Klug showed how a complete interior map of a laser-tag facility had been extracted from the movements of a SWAT team sent inside, in a kind of gonzo mapping exercise, to explore the building's layout. Their movements through space, and the equipment they wore, generated the data for the map. Specifically, if I remember this correctly, sensors mounted with the SWAT team's gear allowed a complete 3D representation to be created, producing manipulable point clouds of spatial data. The slide, I believe, was labeled "SWAT Team Wayfinding."

While this, in and of itself, is not technically mind-blowing, the strategy of sending small teams of expeditionary soldiers out into unknown cities and neighborhoods in order to map, from the ground up, any and all routes, anomalies, events, and short-cuts, seems to promise a kind of militarization of psychogeography, as if the Situationist project has been taken up, albeit from an unexpected direction, by ground armies around the world.

[Image: From the talk by Zebra Imaging at Studio-X NYC; photos by BLDGBLOG].

If, as Eyal Weizman has explored, philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have seen their work instrumentalized and turned into tactical diagrams for military strike teams, then we might also look at SWAT teams wandering through laser-tag facilities in the name of 3D cartography as a strange new, technically advanced chapter in Situationist practice—what McKenzie Wark, in his recent book The Beach Beneath the Street, calls a "calculated drifting" through urban space. Situationism means, Wark writes, "not only understanding but living the city otherwise." The military holograph thus becomes a strange new site where these tendencies (ironically) converge. (Wark will also be speaking at Studio-X NYC this spring, on the evening of Tuesday, April 3).

2) In what was meant as more of an aside, Klug nonetheless said an extraordinary thing: that he and his colleagues have begun joking about what they call "ground environment déjà vu." This remarkable phrase refers to the feeling that one has already experienced a 3D ground environment—an entire landscape, not just visually but immersively—due to prior exposure via holographs.

On several occasions, it seems, having recently printed holographs of a certain environment, the users of these holographs will experience a new kind of spatial familiarity with what would otherwise be a new location; they are able to know, for instance, accurately and in advance, what will be found around corners, where objects are located in relation to others, and even how far apart things are placed.

[Image: From the talk by Zebra Imaging at Studio-X NYC; photos by BLDGBLOG].

Again, in and of itself, this presents a scenario not hugely different from the assumed familiarity one might develop while looking at photographs of an unfamiliar location, then traveling to that location only to find it strangely recognizable, as if you have spent time there before.

But I'm captivated by the suggestion that new representational technologies—new ways of documenting and sharing spatial information—might come with their own cognitive implications: new memory disorders, new anxieties, new sources of identification or confusion. Put another way, what spatial or topographic disorders already exist—such as vertigo—and do certain representational technologies (like 3D film or even Google Street View) augment these disorders or keep them at bay? To use a somewhat absurd example, simply for the point of illustration, could something like 3D film be used someday as a kind of non-chemical cure for acrophobia? You're prescribed a certain time of exposure.

Or, more to the point, will we see, in a world where holographic maps are found everyday—in guide books, on walls of subways—a new social concern with "ground environment déjà vu," an uncanny spatial memory disorder that strikes whenever you encounter the emerging urban phenomenon of the familiar/unfamiliar location?

Last week Nettle gathered at DJ N-Ron’s studio in downtown Brooklyn to record several new songs. Here is a snapshot of the control room magic, creativity captured in full swing.

And here’s a quick montage from filmmaker Sam Fleischner. Sam, director of Wah Do Dem, was recently in Mexico City. I gave him some tips, and he ended up using “Soy Sonidero” from Mudd Up! to cut his footage to. It’s a kind of a meditation on state power vs the power of the people’s daily rhythms. Everybody knows there’s something tragically Freudian about the size of that flag in Zocalo.

Jimmy Kipple Sound: F O R I M M E D I A T E R E L E A S E > > >:

jmmykppl:

New Blank Document by Jimmy Kipple Sound is now available exclusively from our partners at Mediafire.

Moving on from Volume 1, the focus of this second official release from Jimmy Kipple Sound drifts from traffic & authority in the direction of a new weird domesticity and short walks in the early evening.

Whether cheaping out to slowed shortwave radio, shuffling the sounds of the guy fixing the shower or ambling around the city centre haunts of surly wheeled children, Jimmy’s New Blank Document promises many heartening slow fades into a self-consciously damaged soundscapes.

///

Jimmy Kipple Sound can be contacted via tumblr, on twitter or via jmmy_kppl[at]gmail.com

Still from Animation, masks (Jordan Wolfson, 2011)

The central figure in Jordan Wolfson’s Animation, masks (his video which showed at Alex Zachary Peter Currie until recently) is only visible to his torso, like a Jack-in-the box. He’s a caricature who lip-syncs borrowed text while making gestures and expressions that seem cinematically familiar. He’s not comprised of anything; rather, he’s composed through appropriation. 

The character repeats and repeats Richard Brautigan’s Love Poem, heralding a morning without falsehood. In the piece’s most powerful segment, he’s the face for two emotional and articulate individuals whose frank sexual conversation showcases the distance between lovers who, even with their privileged understanding of one another, can’t bridge the difference between empathizing with someone and embodying oneself.  

Still from Animation, masks (Jordan Wolfson, 2011)

That sliver of difference between subject and object and the impossibility of fusing within and without defines the piece. Wolfson has created a compelling synthesis of consumption where the distance between an observer to their object of attention or affection is small but vast. An adept receiver of popular culture exists under his character’s mask of mimicry and enactment; one who inhabits references by parroting them. Animation, masks is that absorptive sponge’s clearly rendered dream.

“Most people on Zazzle are actual people, making products, one at a time, for themselves, as gifts or to make a modest buck. Trolling through Zazzler forums, one reads again and again the hard-learned lesson of techno-capitalism that a hundred terrible shirts invariably will make more money than ten good ones. Here arises a mutant breed of Zazzler—representing a tiny minority of its members but a disproportionately large number of products—marrying the production line and the bottom line with the command line and developing programs that to varying degrees automate their design process, producing tens of thousands of products with little or no human oversight or labor.”

Spam-erican Apparel « DIS Magazine « Amazing, go read.

I delved in each forgotten mind,
The units that had builded me,
Whose deepnesses before were blind
And formless as infinity—
Knowing again each former world—
From planet unto planet whirled
Through gulfs that mightily divide
Like to an intervital sleep.
One world I found, where souls abide
Like winds that rest upon a rose;
Thereto they creep
To loose all burden of old woes.
And one I knew, where warp of pain
Is woven in the soul’s attire;
And one, where with new loveliness
Is strengthened Beauty’s olden chain—
Soft as a sound, and keen as fire—
In light no darkness may depress.

***

Section IV of Clark Ashton Smith’s poem, “The Star-Treader,” from his 1912 collection, The Star-Treader and Other Poems.

Irascible, irrepressible, demanding and frequently brilliant, WILLIAM WELLMAN (1896-1975) is perhaps the least understood great director in American cinema. Action, drama, crime, comedy, musical — Wellman did it all, often unsettling genres even as he helped define them. As for westerns, The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) remains a subversive masterpiece, Jane Darwell’s startlingly malevolent Ma Grier included — Ma Joad she ain’t! [see below] “The only thing in the picture that didn’t strike me as being real, Billie, was my brother Frank refusing a drink and making such a fuss about getting hung,” wrote John Ford in congratulation. “After all, most of his ancestors have been hung and I just can’t see Frank refusing a drink.” If the soft-headed Buffalo Bill (1944) was the price Wellman paid for Ox-Bow’s purity, Yellow Sky (1948), was another dark triumph, one presaging two further landmarks: co-star Gregory Peck’s turn in Henry King’s elegiac The Gunfighter (1950) and Wellman’s superb, woefully under-known feminist western, Westward The Women (1952). While Across The Wide Missouri (1951) — drastically cut by MGM without Wellman’s approval — is a tantalizing what-if, Track Of The Cat (1954) remains an audacious cipher: nature poem, domestic nightmare, feral allegory and a snow western approached only by André De Toth’s Day Of The Outlaw (1959) and Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971). How’d Wellman do it? “I’m the best goddamn two-take director in the business. One for the take I wanted, one in case something went wrong in the lab. Overshooting is asking for trouble.”

***

On his or her birthday, HiLobrow irregularly pays tribute to one of our high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes.

READ MORE about members of the Hardboiled Generation (1894-1903).

reverse-chronological

xintra: ARCHER: Season 3: He's an all-too-human douchebag who shills for DODGE? Who lets ancient Burt Reynolds fuck his MOM? Kill him. Kill him NOW.

Whether she sat to my Friend Hogarth, orno, I will not determine; but she exactly resembled the young Woman who ispouring out her Mistress’s Tea in the third Picture of the Harlot’s Progress.

The whole series is here.

To Generalize is to be an Idiot.  To Particularize is the Alone Distinction ofMerit. . . . Singular & Particular Detail is the Foundation of the Sublime.

 

When the World Shook - H. Rider Haggard 

New books coming soon from Hilobooks

Illustration - Michael Lewy
Cover Design - Tony Leone

Alexandra Gorczynski, Bathroom in the Dark, 2011

March 23^rd, 2011

Early mornings were never my thing. I mean, it’s not that artists are lazy. Or out drinking late most nights. Or not out last night, a Tuesday. Hungover. I go out with the dog.  It’s still basically dark. A kind of dark blue fog, super cold and grey. A couple are out early, two middle aged men bundled up and both smoking with thick leather gloves. They are sitting on a bench in front of the takeout place on the corner. It’s way too cold to be sitting outside.  I hear one say to the other as I pass them, “do you want the thing or the other thing.” And I think, this is true partnership, to have thoughts coalesce around the same object. Not a shared thought, but a coming together. The muffin or the bagel.  Privileging someone else’s desires for a subjectless thing. Generosity. Just as likely the better looking half of an egg and cheese sandwich. I go in the store and order one for myself. Salt and grease. 

Today in 1923 Tennessee became the first state to outlaw the teaching of evolution. Today in 1933 the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, granting Hitler total power. Fittingly, today is miserable. Still basically dark, hail. The never ending domino fall of winter storms. 

March 29^th, 2011

I live in America’s most bug infested city. There are bug infested mattresses all around my neighborhood this evening. It’s trash night and everyone has put the big stuff on the curb. Not just bug-ridden mattresses, also rugs, rotting Ikea cushions from a few seasons back, clothes of all kinds. I drop off my sheets at the laundry across the street and six o’clock news is still on. The anchor woman explains how the city council speaker has launched a new website filled with practical information about the vermin and what they look like at every stage of their life cycle. She ends the segment saying “If you’re a bed bug in New York, today could be your last day.” 

Today is the anniversary  of the conviction of the Rosenbergs- the only American civilians to be executed for espionage during peacetime for supposedly passing a-bomb secrets to the Russians.  My mother calls me to talk about it. She’s a little obsessed, a kind of morbid fascination like what’s really meant by “rubbernecking delays”:  traffic caused by drivers slowing down to get a better look at the aftermath of a car crash. My mother’s relationship to the history of her people. 

The Rosenbergs were mostly Russian, like most of my mother. Like my mother also, Rosenberg. Lefty Jews. Check. A red diaper baby, at home re-reading Camera Lucida:

“It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself, both affected by the same amorous or funereal immobility, at the very heart of the moving world: they are glued together, limb by limb, like the condemned man and the corpse in certain tortures…”

Someone has come out tape a sign to mattress slumped against a lamppost.  A big read X. 

“When NASA teamed up with Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry in 2009 to release a detailed topographic model of the Earth’s surface, the groups probably didn’t envision their data being used to help design levels for a snowboarding game. But that’s just what happened in the development of EA Sports’ SSX, which comes out today with mountain courses built on top of that public domain data set.”

“We wanted to include most of the big iconic mountains in the world, [but] for some of them we’d say ‘No, it’s too jaggy, there’s just no really good nice valley to ride,” Batty said. “There were some [mountains] where we basically had to take in a virtual bulldozer and completely obliterate a lot of what we found to create the basis for the course we would eventually build on there… There were a few places in Patagonia that were just too damn steep, with 80 degree faces that would just get you going at the most ridiculous speeds in our game.”

But it was the unnatural bits in the data that inspired some of the game’s most interesting diversions from reality, Batty said. “When there were really minor errors or holes in the data, we would be riding and taking a look at one of the raw data bits, and then there’d be this giant gaping hole that we’d fall into,” Batty recalls. “And we were like ‘Hey, that’s pretty cool, why don’t we build out an underground cavern in there.’”

How NASA topography data brought dose of reality to SSX snowboarding courses, via Tom T.

Raise your hand if you remember this trend, from the 1970s.

kiameku:

Evariste Richer
Chaque seconde à partir de cet instant, detail
2011
Puzzle with 1000 pieces
80 x 60 cm

Classix Nouveaux’s “Is It a Dream” single came out February 28, 1982. Here’s the first version of the original video.

Colm Tóibín is a person of great virtue!  Here's a bit of the interview I especially liked:

These CDs (pictured) are all different recordings of A German Requiem. But I'm not allowed to listen to any of them until I finish the novel I'm working on – I started it in April 2000. There will be a moment at the end of the novel where the woman will say, 'I'm going to sing in A German Requiem.' I haven't written that scene yet and until I do, I can't listen to my CDs. Everywhere I go I find another recording of A German Requiem and I have them piled up as a warning to myself: get on with your work.

Our friend Jascha has another science fiction music video out, as of today. It’s for his song, “The Future,” a ballad of time travel and lost love. (We announced the first video from Jascha’s new album, The Future Limited, here.)

Lyrics excerpt:

In the future when forgetting was forbidden
They took a tiny little kitten and they cut him up
I was dumbstruck but I was powerless to say so
Cause the agents in the elevator shut me up
I said: “Sweetness, take the children to the car”
You said: “Leave us, cause we need you in the future”

*

Our friend Joe Keohane (who wrote about Nobrowmanship for us, last year) plays bass with The Steamboat Disasters. Listen to a song from their forthcoming debut album. “No News is Good News (When You Die Without the Lord) is a rarity: a gritty, hard-swinging country song that celebrates atheism.

Lyrics excerpt:

The last time I got religion I was in a jam for sure
And just as soon as I got out I found my thoughts remained impure
And while my acts could only be constrained by the likelihood of ends obtained
My mom’s ambivalent refrain kept coming back to me

No news is good news when you die without the Lord
You better pray there ain’t nothing on the other side
’cause you won’t hear no angels singing but those might be hell’s bells a-ringing
For you no news is good news once you die

Personal project: Figure 

[Pronunciation Book]

Pronunciation Book is a youtube channel that was registered on
April 14, 2010, intended as a resource for “correct” pronunciations of a variety of words that were
complex, foreign, or otherwise difficult to pronounce. Each video had a
distinct aesthetic, consisting of a still frame with the word being pronounced spelled in a
simple, black, sans-serif font on a white background with a copyright date and
the channel’s URL. Each word was repeated three times with different emphasis,
and videos lasted no longer than 15 seconds. The videos are simple, even artistic in their presentation, reminiscent of On Kawara’s date paintings from his Today series, each word concrete yet abstracted from its context. Early traffic was no doubt driven
by sincere users looking for the proper pronunciation of various words. Indeed there exist a number of youtube channels that serve precisely that purpose, many of which are geared toward ESL viewers; but for whatever reason, Pronunciation Book rubbed many the wrong way, and soon the videos became a popular
destination for trolling, spam, and rage. The comments section of each video
range from angry corrections of the given pronunciation to outright mockery in
the form of re-spellings, dislikes, sarcasm, and a strong undercurrent of
racism and xenophobia. Commenters often defended regional pronunciations and
accents, or simply mocked the need for such a guide in the first place.

Pronunciation
Book would seem to have tapped into an essential truth of the Web and all it’s presumed
meritocracy: act like you know more or are better than people, and be prepared
to drown in a sea of rage. Perhaps the most sophisticated response to the
channel came exactly one year later in the form of a separate parody channel
titled Pronunciation Manual. Pronunciation Manual adopts the visual aesthetic
of Pronunciation Book, but purposefully and comically mispronounces every word.
Both Pronunciation Book and Pronunciation Manual continue to actively produce
videos, and it is perhaps one of the most devoted and longest running trolls to
date. We’ve collected several of our favorite examples below.

[Pronunciation Manual]

HiLobrow is currently running a micro-fiction contest (deadline: March 14) that asks readers to write a very short pulp hero blurb for a famous non-pulp work of fiction or film.

In order to provide inspiration for this creative challenge, HiLobrow is currently publishing a series of posts featuring several minor golden-age superhero establishing panels.

Click on image for larger version

As John Hilgart notes, in his introduction to this series of posts,

These panels are at the center of the discursive Venn diagram where pulp fiction heroes, radio heroes, and comic books converged. They’re concept pitches, delivered with “coming up next,” “don’t touch that dial” urgency. Many could serve as blurbs on the covers of paperbacks. The heroes’ names and their typography tell you unambiguously how to deliver them in the correct dramatic voice.

Click on image for larger version

Though these heroes may seem silly, Hilgart — who gave us his folder of golden-age superhero establishing panels, to use for this series — encourages us to recall that the form of the panels shown here is not intrinsically goofy; it’s just “a concentrated sketch of character and purpose, delivered with the energy of a pitch.”

Click on image for larger version

That’s exactly the point of HiLobrow’s micro-fiction contest, which runs from February 21 through March 14; only we challenge you to pitch a classic novel or movie in this form. Here are the contest rules; it’s also the place to submit your entry. Write your pitch today!

Click on image for larger version

***

The contest is sponsored by our friends at Pazzo Books, purveyor of high-, low-, and hilobrow used, rare, and impossible-to-find books, plus maps and other ephemera. Please click on the banner below to visit their website.

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SIMILAR HILOBROW SERIES: MEET THE L.I.S. — John Hilgart discovers “implicit superheroes” concealed within comic-book mastheads | 4CP FRIDAY — themed comic-book detail galleries, curated by fans of John Hilgart’s 4CP project | CHESS MATCH — a gallery of pulp fiction chess games | COMICALLY VINTAGE — that’s-what-she-said vintage comic panels | DC — THE NEW 52 — an 11-year-old reviews DC’s new lineup | FILE X — a one-of-a-kind gallery of “X” pulp paperback covers | KIRB YOUR ENTHUSIASM — 25 writers on 25 Jack Kirby panels | SECRET PANEL — Silver Age comics’ double entendres | SKRULLICISM — they lurk among us

CLICK HERE for more comics and cartoon-related posts on HiLobrow.

xintra: TITHE to Mullah Santorum's Corporate Caliphate SuperPac. GOAL: 72% rise in public floggings, girl-free schools by 2015 http://t.co/uJb4fIsO

xintra: It's the Age of Surveillance. Some mainframe MUST have footage of purple Newt shattering Callista's hair against a colonial walnut headboard

[Image: Undersea robots guard the internet; image via Wired UK].

In what appears to be a sponsored post, a short article published on Wired UK presents an interesting scene in which semi-autonomous robots protect undersea internet cables from harm—that is, "dexterous robots toil at the bottom of the sea to safeguard the web."

As the CEO of a company called Global Marine Systems explains, submarine cables "the width of a human hair" support 95% of the world's internet traffic. Thus, "to cope with the demand for cable repairs," the company has "invested in a number of remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) at our facility in Portland, Dorset." They continue:

ROVs act like underwater robots, and are used to locate cable breaks on the seabed... and repair them. Once the ROV is lowered into the sea, a pilot on board one of our cable ships controls it to find the fault location and fix it.

The idea that little machine-guardians at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, like mechanical demiurges on the invisible edge of the world, are at least partially responsible for ensuring that this post can be read in Europe is a comforting thought before bed.

It is a hazard of working on eighteenth-century literature: these are in fact only six books, not nineteen, and in an ideal world I would reread them all over the next couple of days while finishing working on a talk I'm giving on Thursday!  (And where is my 'real' edition of Locke's Essay?  One of these days I am actually going to have to clean up my office in Philosophy Hall....)

Predator drone drawn to scale.

Drone Shadow 001, Silicon Car Park, 27/02/2012. James Bridle & Einar Sneve Martinussen.

Waiting for the bus this morning, CJ told another kid not to budge in line.  ”You mean butt in line,” I said.  ”DADDY,” CJ said, giggling, “you are being silly.”  ”No, seriously,” I said, “it’s butt, not budge.”  So we asked the other kids in line, and all agreed — when you force your way into a line, you are “budging.”

I researched this, and indeed — “budge in line” is Wisconsin / Minnesota dialect.  (It’s also apparently common in Western Canada, for some reason.)  This was news to me.  Tanya reports hearing “ditch in line” as a kid, which is apparently some kind of Ohio thing.

So:  do you cut, butt, or budge?  And where are you from?

(Subsidiary question:  is there a poll site, a la surveymonkey, that will allow me to set this up as an online poll, ask respondents for the zip code of their home town, and then plot the answers on the map?)

“A civil court in Spain handed down last Thursday a ruling dismissing plaintiff’s claims against Google Spain over the so called “right to be forgotten”. The case is Alfacs Vacances SL v. Google Spain SL (ruling of February 23, 2012, issued by the Court of First Instance of Amposta). While the right to be forgotten is being the subject of heavy litigation in Spain, this is one of few judicial rulings on the matter. Indeed, most claims have been brought before the Spanish Data Protection Authority, its orders being subsequently challenged before the Audiencia Nacional (the court with the power to reverse the orders issued by the DP Authority). About 130 cases are thus pending before the AN, which might be about to refer the issue to the EUJC.”

- Google Spain wins lawsuit over the “right to be forgotten” « ISP Liability

kimjongillookingatthings:

looking at a monitor

“I don’t even like Celeriac… I am at war with a robot version of myself.”

Esc and Ctrl: Jon Ronson v ‘Jon Ronson’ spambot - video | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

 

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(from “Tales Intended to Cause a State of Astonishment,” by Michael Kupperman, 2012)

“Network Time is an internet based unit system created by Spiros Hadjidjanos late 2011, it consists of several Wi-Fi routers arranged in the gallery space providing free Internet access to visitors. The LED that reflects the data-traffic of each router is extended along a fiber optic cable magnifying its flicker. Although the devices look only physically modified, the artist has altered the operating system of each router, to manipulate the fluctuation of the fiber optics.”

Network Time by Spiros Hadjidjanos | TRIANGULATION BLOG

This is a picture of the American electorate!

More precisely; this is a scatterplot I just made using the dataset recently released by PPP, a major political polling firm.  (They’re the outfit that did the “is your state hot or not” poll I blogged about last week.)  PPP has made available the raw responses from 46 polls with 1000 responses each, conducted more or less weekly over the course of 2011.  Here’s the whole thing as a .zip file.

Analyzing data sets like this is in some sense not hard.  But there’s a learning curve.  Little things, like:  you have to know that the .csv format is beautifully portable and universal — it’s the ASCII of data.  You have to know how to get your .csv file into your math package of choice (in my case, python, but I think I could easily have done this in r or MatLab as well) and you have to know where to get a PCA package, if it’s not already installed.  And you have to know how to output a new .csv file and make a graphic from it when you’re done.  (As you can see, I haven’t quite mastered this last part, and have presented you with a cruddy Excel scatterplot.)  In total, this probably took me about three hours to do, and now that I have a data-to-picture path I understand how to use, I think I could do it again in about 30 minutes.  It’s fun and I highly recommend it.  There’s a lot of data out there.

So what is this picture?  The scatterplot has 1000 points, one for each person polled in the December 15, 2011 PPP survey.  The respondents answered a bunch of questions, mostly about politics:

Q1: Do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of Barack Obama?
Q2: Do you approve or disapprove of Barack Obama’s job performance?
Q3: Do you think Barack Obama is too liberal, too conservative, or about right?
Q4: Do you approve or disapprove of the job Harry Reid is doing?
Q5: Do you approve or disapprove of the job Mitch McConnell is doing?
Q6: Do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of the Democratic Party?
Q7: Do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of the Republican Party?
Q8: Generally speaking, if there was an election today, would you vote to reelect Barack Obama, or would you vote for his Republican opponent?
Q9: Are you very excited, somewhat excited, or not at all excited about voting in the 2012 elections?
Q10: If passed into law one version of immigration reform that people have discussed would secure the border and crack down on employers who hire illegal immigrants. It would also require illegal immigrants to register for legal immigration status, pay back taxes, and learn English in order to be eligible for U.S. citizenship. Do you favor or oppose Congress passing this version of immigration reform?
Q11: Have you heard about the $10,000 bet Mitt Romney challenged Rick Perry to in last week’s Republican Presidential debate?
Q12: (Asked only of those who say ‘yes’ to Q11:) Did Romney‚Äôs bet make you more or less likely to vote for him next year, or did it not make a difference either way?
Q13: Do you believe that there’s a “War on Christmas” or not?
Q14: Do you consider yourself to be a liberal, moderate, or conservative?
Q15: Do you consider yourself to be a supporter of the Tea Party or not?
Q16: Are you or is anyone in your household a member of a labor union?
Q17: If you are a woman, press 1. If a man, press 2.
Q18: If you are a Democrat, press 1. If a Republican, press 2. If you are an independent or a member of another party, press 3.
Q19: If you are Hispanic, press 1. If white, press 2. If African American, press 3. If Asian, press 4. If you are an American Indian, press 5. If other, press 6.
Q20: (Asked only of people who say American Indian on Q19:) Are you enrolled in a federally recognized tribe?
Q21: If you are 18 to 29 years old, press 1. If 30 to 45, press 2. If 46 to 65, press 3. If you are older than 65, press 4.
Q22: What part of the country do you live in NOW – the Northeast, the Midwest, the South, or the West?
Q23: What is your household’s annual income?

The answers to these questions, which are coded as integers, now give us 1000 points in R^{23}.  Our eyes are not good at looking at point clouds in 23-dimensional space.  So it’s useful to project down to R^2, that mos bloggable of Euclidean spaces.  But how?  We could just look at two coordinates and see what we get.  But this requires careful choice.  Suppose I map the voters onto the plane via their answers to Q1 and Q2.  The problem is, almost everyone who has a favorable opinion of Barack Obama approves of his job performance, and vice versa.  Considering these two features is hardly better than considering only one feature.  Better would be to look at Q8 and Q21; these two variables are surely less correlated, and studying both together would give us good information on how support for Obama varies with age.  But still, we’re throwing out a lot.  Principal component analysis is a very popular quick-n-dirty method of dimension reduction; it finds the projection onto R^2 (or a Euclidean space of any desired dimension) which best captures the variance in the original dataset.  In particular, the two axes in the PCA projection have correlation zero with each other.

A projection from R^23 to R^2 can be expressed by two vectors, each one of which is some linear combination of the original 23 variables.  The hope is always that, when you stare at the entries of these vectors, the corresponding axis has some “meaning” that jumps out at you.  And that’s just what happens here.

The horizontal axis is “left vs. right.”  It assigns positive weight to approving of Obama, identifying as a liberal, and approving of the Democratic Party, and negative weight to supporting the Tea Party and believing in a “War on Christmas.”  It would be very weird if any analysis of this kind of polling data didn’t pull out political affiliation as the dominant determinant of poll answers.

The second axis is “low-information voter vs. high-information voter,” I think.  It assigns a negative value to all answers of the form “don’t know / won’t answer,” and positive value to saying you are “very excited to vote” and having heard about Mitt Romney’s $10,000 bet.  (Remember that?)

And now the picture already tells you something interesting.  These two variables are uncorrelated, by definition, but they are not unrelated.  The voters split roughly into two clusters, the Democrats and the Republicans.  But the plot is “heart-shaped” — the farther you go into the low-information voters, the less polarization there is between the two parties, until in the lower third of the graph it is hard to tell there are two parties at all.  This phenomenon is not surprising — but I think it’s pretty cool that it pops right out of a completely automatic process.

(I am less sure about the third-strongest axis, which I didn’t include in the plot.  High scorers here, like low scorers on axis 2, tend to give a lot of “don’t know” answers, except when asked about Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell, whom they dislike.  They are more likely to say they’re “not at all excited to vote” and more likely to be independents.  So I think one might call this the “to hell with all those crooks” axis.)

A few technical notes:  I removed questions, like “region of residence,” that didn’t really map on a linear scale, and others, like “income,” that not everyone answered.  I normalized all the columns to have equal variance.  I made new 0-1-valued columns to record “don’t know” answers.  Yes, I know that many people consider it bad news to run PCA on binary variables, but I decided that since I was just trying to draw pictures and not infer anything, it would be OK.

“I make nature videos for my YouTube channel, generally in remote wilderness away from any possible source of music. And I purposely avoid using a soundtrack in my videos because of all the horror stories I hear about Rumblefish filing claims against public domain music. But when uploading my latest video, YouTube informed me that I was using Rumblefish’s copyrighted content, and so ads would be placed on my video, with the proceeds going to said company. This baffled me. I disputed their claim with YouTube’s system — and Rumblefish refuted my dispute, and asserted that: ‘All content owners have reviewed your video and confirmed their claims to some or all of its content: Entity: rumblefish; Content Type: Musical Composition.’ So I asked some questions, and it appears that the birds singing in the background of my video are Rumblefish’s exclusive intellectual property.”

YouTube Identifies Birdsong As Copyrighted Music (Original video, Original forum post).

“Code is just dialogue for digital actors.” - Twitter / @mathpunk

Tim Davis, Cornelia Rutgers Livingston, (2003)

Paradoxically, exhibiting artists that rage against the
institution within the institution is both non-ironic and particularly vogue. Unlike
the institutional critique of the late 1960s and 70s, which had the exceedingly explicit dynamic of the artist versus
institution, those roles today have become less clearly defined. Consider  Creative Time, the New York based public
sculpture non-profit headed by Nato Thompson and Anne Pasternak, which has
recently extended its brand to support the occupation of other institutions as
an institution itself. Thompson and Pasternak called for the take-over of the
Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Lent Space last December in an open letter posted
on occupyartnyc.org, signed also by art world professionals, listing their
institutional affiliations beside their names. And how could one
forget the sophomoric hullabaloo surrounding Take Artists Space last October,
in which artist Georgia Sagri botched an occupation of the Soho nonprofit
Artists Space, all the while admitting that powerful commercial galleries such
as Gagosian would be a better target for their concerns, though less
sympathetic to their efforts than non-profits. Sagri is now included in the
upcoming Whitney Biennial. How an artist negotiates contextualization as
fuck-it-all raucous, while cosmopolitan and strategic enough for institutional
recognition remains to be seen. 

Institutional critique dates back to the late 1960s and
1970s when both government and private support of American public institutions
existed on a different plane than it does today. The NEA’s annual budget peaked
in 1992 at $176 million, and thanks to the “culture wars” of that period, is
about half of that today considering inflation. Offering both historical and
contemporary perspectives coming from the lineage of institutional critique is Spies in the House of Art, recently
opened at the Metropolitan Museum. (The exhibition’s press release erroneously
states that the show begins with the dawn of artists working with the subject
of the museum, which they locate in the 1980s, though that would likely make
Belgian institutional critique pioneer Marcel Broodthaers roll in his grave. It
also purports to study the “secret lives of museums,” which sounds better as a
movie tagline than a curatorial thesis.) Nevertheless, the juxtaposition of the
more aggressive work of institutional critique greats such as Andrea Fraser with
the less full-on work of younger artists such as the British filmmaking duo
Nashashibi/Skaer illustrates how thoroughly conversations surrounding
institutional critique have become neutralized, which is arguably due to the
recent passing of art world power from museums to galleries acting as
international chains such as the aforementioned Gagosian.

Thomas Struth, The Restorers at San Lorenzo Maggiore, Naples, (1988)

For her 1989 video “Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk,”
Fraser dons the character of the upper-class museum docent Jane Castleton, who
bears a striking semblance to Parker Posey’s yuppie, catalog-shopping,
Starbucks-loving character Meg Swan in “Best in Show.” Castleton guides us around the Philadelphia Museum of Art with a running
commentary on the obvious class differences of several works, suggesting, for
example, that a nearby marble figure needs a manicure. She enthuses about the
cleanliness and formal attributes of a drinking fountain, and asserts that for
a mere $750,000, you could buy the titling privileges for the museum’s book
shop. (Andrea is a lovely name, she suggests.) In a move that could be
considered equally ham fisted as compelling, Fraser and the exhibition curator
have decided to install the video in a nearby gallery featuring the French
academic painter Alexandre Cabanel, as this is the sort of work that would
appeal to Fraser’s character Castleton.

Other works are less charged, such as Thomas Strüth’s “The
Restorers at San Lorenzo Maggiore, Naples,” 1988, a sizable chromogenic print
shot with a large format camera. In “Restorers,” the artist stages workers in
a church refectory around paintings recently damaged by an earthquake. The
paintings appear similar to the Tiepolos elsewhere in the Met, and echo the
staged presence of the young workers composed by Strüth. Nearby, fellow Bernd and Hilla Becher pupil Candida Höfer presents a 1988 photograph of an airily
light, empty Museo Civico in Venice, furthering her quest to study the
psychology of social architecture. Barreling back into the museum’s storage
room is American photographer Louise Lawler’s “Cabinet 2, Shelf 14,” 1997,
which depicts the butt, legs, and torso of sculptures peeking out of a storage
chest. Borrowing a bit of Fraser’s tempestuousness is a late work by Francesca
Woodman. A monumental diazo collage, Woodman pieces together segments of
variably in-focus photographic prints playing with scale and perspective.
Images of toga-clad female figures act as columns in a gigantic Greek
structure, the figures also appearing as goat hooves. The geometric detailing
on the Greek building is actually an image of the embellishment on a tiled
bathroom floor. The collage’s eerie quality is heightened by the knowledge that
Woodman committed suicide soon after its completion.

Nashashibi / Skaer [Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer] Flash in the Metropolitan, film still (2006)

Most successful are two later works which both, curiously,
use the photographic flash to either obscure or highlight objects in museum collections.
Tim Davis’ “Cornelia Rutgers Livingston,” 2003, photographs an 1833 painting of
the same name by Henry Inman. The painting, which features a young girl in a
white dress holding a basket of flowers on her right arm, is obscured by Davis’
flash, washing out the subject’s face and the violet held by her outstretched
left arm. Similarly playful and borderline antagonistic is Rosalind Nashashibi
and Lucy Skaer’s “Flash at the Metropolitan,” 2006. The 16mm film takes a
strobe flash and camera through a track around the Metropolitan under nightfall,
providing pulsating momentary illumination to the Met’s ancient artifacts.
Here, the institutional supports and context of the museum fade away, its
relics playfully enlivened. 

Francesca Woodman, The Temple, (1980)

Watching the slow march of institutional critique becoming
less and less a critique, but more a consideration of the institutional
context, prompts doubt whether it is possible to critique the institution while
complicit within it walls. Yet, perhaps a better quandary to ponder is what the
real “institution” to react against in 2012 actually is—are we to occupy
museums? Critique institutions? Abandon Facebook? Sell sex to collectors to
highlight the sexist confines of the art market? Whatever the answer, I have a feeling we’re not going to find it at the Met, or
in a biennial.

 

Comments on “Bonsai Buildings” Add Magical Model Houses To An Ancient Artform | Co.Design: business innovation design via @doingitwrong

I’m very pleased to announce the opening tonight of Game Change: Videogames as Art Medium and inspiration, part of the Pulse Festival at the Telfair Museum in Savannah, GA. My silkscreened poster series, There’s No One There, are a featured part of the exhibition.  This is the first time they will be shown in public, and are a kind of preview to the show they’ll have in New York in May.

If you’re in the Savannah area, please go check it out!

“Both of the people in this car are asleep. Britain, we are doing this wrong.” by Tom T